Genre: Bildungsroman is a novel depicting someone coming of age. The novel is a narration by Holden Caulfield, a troubled and mentally unstable sixteen year-old that has just been expelled from his fourth prep school. It is a narrative. Holden tells us his story; how he got kicked out of schools, how he spent a few nights in New York, how he has interacted with people from the past. He tells all of this and all of his thoughts and throughout the story he goes through stages and realization that growing up is a hell in itself. School work, interactions, and everything in life changes as you mature and a bildungsroman shows us this. After writing and thinking about bildungsromans a question came into my mind. “Though one assumes that Holden is receiving and responding to treatment, his attitude and tone are unchanged throughout the novel. If the protagonist has not matured since story began, how can Catcher in the Rye be considered a bildungsroman?” Holden Caulfield is looking back at himself and writing and although his tone doesn’t change he realizes that he has become of age and is maturing. He just might apply himself in the next school year and he might follow the path of his mind and its size. (212) The plot and how it all goes down: Holden Caulfield is rehabilitating in a California hospital. He begins to relay the events that occurred when he was expelled from Pencey Prep the previous winter during his sixteenth year. His story begins with his return to Pencey after a failed fencing exhibition—failed because Holden accidentally left the team’s foils on the subway. His absent-mindedness is the cause of many of Holden’s problems. In fact, his expulsion is precisely because he doesn’t do his best work and try during his studies. He, however, has no love for the school and considers the students to be mean and the adults to be phony. His parents do not yet of his expulsion and he hesitates to return home before they receive the letter from the headmaster. He plans to hang out at Pencey for a few more days. However, things do not go according to his plan. First, he visits Spencer, his old history teacher. Spencer tries to understand why Holden has failed. Holden attempts to explain that he simply did not care about all the information being taught in class. He tries to tell Spencer not to feel bad. Holden gives a hint of the thing he does care about: death—and the Central Park ducks. In other words, Holden is concerned with the mystery of life and why things are the way they are. Lectures bore him. He excels, on the other hand, at writing compositions and English is the one class that he is not failing. None of this satisfies Spencer and all the old man can do is wish Holden good luck. Holden, sad and depressed, returns to his room. Back at his dorm, he learns that his roommate Stradlater is going out with a girl Holden used to be good friends with, a girl named Jane Gallagher. Holden spends the next three days thinking about her and sometimes trying to call her. He ends up in a dispute with Stradlater over her. The fight leads to Holden’s decision to leave the Pencey Prep early and get a hotel in New York City and wait out the next few days there. However, in New York City he quickly falls into a further depression than he had been in. He tries to occupy himself with various activities. He goes dancing at the Lavender Club in his hotel; goes to Ernie’s to drink and hear the piano, walks around a great deal, dabbles briefly and unsuccessfully with a pimp and his prostitute, makes a date with Sally Hayes, falls in love with the sight of her, and falls out of love with the things she says and way she acts. He attempts to talk to Sally about how much he hates school and phony people but she does not appear to understand and does not think Holden even really knows what he is trying to say. All the same, he tries to make her see the sense in his plan, which is to escape the city, build a cabin in the woods, get a simple, earnest job and live a simple, earnest life. He ends up proposing marriage to her, but she declines. Then, he offends her by saying she is a royal pain in his ass. She refuses to spend any more time with him. After Sally and his date, he sees a movie that depresses him, meets up with Carl Luce, who depresses him further; gets drunk, which depresses him; visits the lagoon where the ducks usually are in Central Park, which depresses him further; fears he might catch pneumonia from being outside in the freezing cold; and decides he wants to sneak home and talk to Phoebe, his sister. It is with Phoebe that he has an epiphany concerning his vocation. His vocation is inspired by the lines of a Robert Burns poem, which he heard a child repeating earlier in the day. Holden decides he wants his vocation to be a catcher in the rye, helping children fine themselves before they fall of the edge; that is to say, he wants to preserve innocence—somehow. After seeing Phoebe and inspired by his epiphany (and yet exhausted by his activities), he goes to visit his old teacher Mr. Antolini. He plans on staying with Mr. Antolini for a couple of days, but awakes during the night thinking that Mr. Antolini is attempting pass at him. He dresses hurriedly and leaves and sleeps at Grand Central station. He wakes the following day wondering if he made the right choice. He decides it is possible that he misconstrued Mr. Antolini’s intentions—but never returns to find out. He walks around a good deal more, speaks to his dead brother Allie, feels physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted, and finally settles on a new plan. Holden chooses to abandon his life in New York and hitchhike his way out West. He meets up with Phoebe to tell her goodbye… (820) The Characters: Holden Caulfield: The obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools; he manifests complete apathy toward his future; he is hospitalized, and visited by a psychoanalyst. We know of two traumas in his past that clearly have something to do with his emotional state: the death of his brother Allie and the suicide of one of his schoolmates. But, even with that knowledge, it is hard for us to label him as anything. He has such a darker way of looking at things that make him complicated. He says repeatedly that he is a “Mad man, I swear I am.” He knows there is something wrong with him, he is too depressed. The most noticeable of Holden’s “peculiarities” is how extremely judgmental he is of almost everything and everybody. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are “phony.” Holden applies the term “phony” not to people who are insincere but to those who are too conventional or too typical. And Holden hates phonies. Holden is a virgin, but he is very interested in sex, and, in fact, he spends much of the novel trying to lose his virginity. He feels strongly that sex should happen between people who care deeply about and respect one another, and he is upset by the realization that sex can be casual. Stradlater’s date with Jane doesn’t just make him jealous; it infuriates him to think of a girl he knows well having sex with a boy she doesn’t know well. He is confused and enriched by the ideas of sex. Holden’s character is one of the most complex and interesting character there is. Mr. Antolini: Mr. Antolini is the adult who comes closest to reaching Holden. He manages to avoid alienating Holden, and being labeled a “phony,” because he doesn’t behave conventionally. He doesn’t mind Holdens quick call in the night and he also reveals on the spur of the moment that he is drinking in his messy apartment. Mr. Antolini’s advice to Holden about why he should apply himself to his studies is also unconventional. He recognizes that Holden is different from other students, and he validates Holden’s suffering and confusion by suggesting that one day they may be worth writing about. He represents education not as a path of conformity but as a means for Holden to develop his unique voice and to find the ideas that are most appropriate to him. Holden is touched on the headed, maybe patted on the head by Mr. Antolini, and Holden remarks this as sexual. However, there is little evidence to suggest that he is making a sexual overture, as Holden thinks, and much evidence that Holden misinterprets his action. Holden indicates in Chapter 19 that he is extremely nervous around possible homosexuals and that he worries about suddenly becoming one. We also know that he has been thinking about sex constantly since leaving Pencey. Finally, this is not the only scene in which Holden recoils from a physical approach. Holden does though quickly regret his hasty decision of this. D.B. Caulfield: D.B. is Holden's older brother is a screenwriter in Hollywood. He is liked by Holden but also called a phony, because some of his works are better than others in Holden’s eyes. Holden hates the movies so he says he doesn’t love what D.B. writes. Although there are many mentions of him the most telling information we get about D.B. has to do with the war. Holden reveals in a flashback that D.B. used to be in the Army. From what the narration reveals, the experience had quite a traumatizing effect on D.B. The character of D.B. reminds us of reality and shows us the how harsh war is. Holden hates it. (674) Themes and main ideas: “"Boy!" I said. I also say "Boy!" quite a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.” This quote sums the entire theme of growing up, up. Although Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman, his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. It shows the toughness of coming of age and how hard it is. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of phonies. “"Well – take me (Holden) to the Edmont then," I said. “Would you (Random cab driver) care to stop on the way and join me for a cocktail? On me, I'm loaded."” Holden is lonely. Very lonely. His behavior indicates his loneliness; Holden consistently shies away from contemplation and thus doesn’t really know why he keeps behaving as he does. Because Holden depends on his isolation to preserve his detachment from the world and to maintain a level of self-protection, he often sabotages his own attempts to end his loneliness. He doesn’t like the real world or reality, it scares him. For example, his conversation with Carl Luce and his date with Sally Hayes are made unbearable by his rude behavior. His calls to Jane Gallagher are aborted for a similar reason: to protect his precious and fragile sense of individuality. (365) The conflict: The major conflict is the phony adult world. Holden Caulfield cannot decide whether to stay with his old, nice childhood or to go to the adult world with all the “phonies.” Holden was crazy about certain things and he was emotionally and mentally compromised. Everything was viewed differently since his brother died and he started to have a mental break down. “I (Holden) was only thirteen, and they were going to have my psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.” He is always saying we don’t know Allie. Allie was something special to Holden and a symbol of the younger world; without any of the phonies. He wants to be grown up and treated like one, but yet he also wants the simplicities of a child and none of the responsibility. While I was waiting around for Phoebe in the museum, right outside the doors and all, these two little kids came up to me and asked if I knew where the mummies were. The one little kid, the one that asked me, had his pants open. I told him about it. So he buttoned them right up where he was standing talking to me – he didn't even bother to go behind a post or anything. He killed me.” This is something else that Holden prefers about children to adults: they never worry about being embarrassed. These boys are entirely unconcerned with appearances – a refreshing change from the "phonies" Holden has been surrounded by in the adult world. Holden wants that and that is the central conflict. (350) Art form:
The Rye field in this picture you can see endless rye. Close your eyes. Imagine 20 or so kids playing in the rye just running around, but at the end of this rye field there is a cliff. A sharp steep drop that is not survivable. The kids run around and play in the rye field but they get too close to the edge; that’s why there is a man there. He saves the kids, he doesn’t let them fall, and he catches them. He is a catcher in the rye. Open your eyes. That is what Holden’s dream job is; to “catch a body coming thro the rye” (109)
The Rye field in this picture you can see endless rye. Close your eyes. Imagine 20 or so kids playing in the rye just running around, but at the end of this rye field there is a cliff. A sharp steep drop that is not survivable. The kids run around and play in the rye field but they get too close to the edge; that’s why there is a man there. He saves the kids, he doesn’t let them fall, and he catches them. He is a catcher in the rye. Open your eyes. That is what Holden’s dream job is; to “catch a body coming thro the rye” (109)
New words: “The whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train.” Ostracized is to be taken out of the group or community.
“I just got very cool and nonchalant.” Nonchalant is to be cool and calm with something.
“I was pretty sadistic with him quite often.” Sadistic is the deriving of pleasure from something.
“It was very ironical. It really was. "I'm the one that's flunking out of the goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition," I said.” Ironical comes from irony and the fact that it is bizarre and strange maybe twisted.
“If you knew Stradlater, you'd have been worried, too. . . . He was unscrupulous.” Unscrupulous means to have no or very few morals of your own.
Others like this one: Other books the catcher and the rye has been related to is huckleberry fin. But in my opinion anything describing the coming of age or someone maturing in this world is directly related to this book. There have been many paintings and works of art describing a rye field and kids running and playing in that rye field and then as they approach the ledge a catcher catches them and sends them back to playing. That’s his only job, catching the kids. Such a simple idea but yet in art form it can show so much.
The Catcher in The Rye
Grant ParkerGenre: Bildungsroman is a novel depicting someone coming of age. The novel is a narration by Holden Caulfield, a troubled and mentally unstable sixteen year-old that has just been expelled from his fourth prep school. It is a narrative. Holden tells us his story; how he got kicked out of schools, how he spent a few nights in New York, how he has interacted with people from the past. He tells all of this and all of his thoughts and throughout the story he goes through stages and realization that growing up is a hell in itself. School work, interactions, and everything in life changes as you mature and a bildungsroman shows us this. After writing and thinking about bildungsromans a question came into my mind. “Though one assumes that Holden is receiving and responding to treatment, his attitude and tone are unchanged throughout the novel. If the protagonist has not matured since story began, how can Catcher in the Rye be considered a bildungsroman?” Holden Caulfield is looking back at himself and writing and although his tone doesn’t change he realizes that he has become of age and is maturing. He just might apply himself in the next school year and he might follow the path of his mind and its size. (212)
The plot and how it all goes down: Holden Caulfield is rehabilitating in a California hospital. He begins to relay the events that occurred when he was expelled from Pencey Prep the previous winter during his sixteenth year.
His story begins with his return to Pencey after a failed fencing exhibition—failed because Holden accidentally left the team’s foils on the subway. His absent-mindedness is the cause of many of Holden’s problems. In fact, his expulsion is precisely because he doesn’t do his best work and try during his studies. He, however, has no love for the school and considers the students to be mean and the adults to be phony. His parents do not yet of his expulsion and he hesitates to return home before they receive the letter from the headmaster. He plans to hang out at Pencey for a few more days.
However, things do not go according to his plan. First, he visits Spencer, his old history teacher. Spencer tries to understand why Holden has failed. Holden attempts to explain that he simply did not care about all the information being taught in class. He tries to tell Spencer not to feel bad. Holden gives a hint of the thing he does care about: death—and the Central Park ducks. In other words, Holden is concerned with the mystery of life and why things are the way they are. Lectures bore him.
He excels, on the other hand, at writing compositions and English is the one class that he is not failing. None of this satisfies Spencer and all the old man can do is wish Holden good luck. Holden, sad and depressed, returns to his room.
Back at his dorm, he learns that his roommate Stradlater is going out with a girl Holden used to be good friends with, a girl named Jane Gallagher. Holden spends the next three days thinking about her and sometimes trying to call her. He ends up in a dispute with Stradlater over her. The fight leads to Holden’s decision to leave the Pencey Prep early and get a hotel in New York City and wait out the next few days there.
However, in New York City he quickly falls into a further depression than he had been in. He tries to occupy himself with various activities. He goes dancing at the Lavender Club in his hotel; goes to Ernie’s to drink and hear the piano, walks around a great deal, dabbles briefly and unsuccessfully with a pimp and his prostitute, makes a date with Sally Hayes, falls in love with the sight of her, and falls out of love with the things she says and way she acts. He attempts to talk to Sally about how much he hates school and phony people but she does not appear to understand and does not think Holden even really knows what he is trying to say. All the same, he tries to make her see the sense in his plan, which is to escape the city, build a cabin in the woods, get a simple, earnest job and live a simple, earnest life. He ends up proposing marriage to her, but she declines. Then, he offends her by saying she is a royal pain in his ass. She refuses to spend any more time with him.
After Sally and his date, he sees a movie that depresses him, meets up with Carl Luce, who depresses him further; gets drunk, which depresses him; visits the lagoon where the ducks usually are in Central Park, which depresses him further; fears he might catch pneumonia from being outside in the freezing cold; and decides he wants to sneak home and talk to Phoebe, his sister. It is with Phoebe that he has an epiphany concerning his vocation. His vocation is inspired by the lines of a Robert Burns poem, which he heard a child repeating earlier in the day. Holden decides he wants his vocation to be a catcher in the rye, helping children fine themselves before they fall of the edge; that is to say, he wants to preserve innocence—somehow. After seeing Phoebe and inspired by his epiphany (and yet exhausted by his activities), he goes to visit his old teacher Mr. Antolini. He plans on staying with Mr. Antolini for a couple of days, but awakes during the night thinking that Mr. Antolini is attempting pass at him. He dresses hurriedly and leaves and sleeps at Grand Central station. He wakes the following day wondering if he made the right choice. He decides it is possible that he misconstrued Mr. Antolini’s intentions—but never returns to find out. He walks around a good deal more, speaks to his dead brother Allie, feels physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted, and finally settles on a new plan.
Holden chooses to abandon his life in New York and hitchhike his way out West. He meets up with Phoebe to tell her goodbye… (820)
The Characters: Holden Caulfield: The obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools; he manifests complete apathy toward his future; he is hospitalized, and visited by a psychoanalyst. We know of two traumas in his past that clearly have something to do with his emotional state: the death of his brother Allie and the suicide of one of his schoolmates. But, even with that knowledge, it is hard for us to label him as anything. He has such a darker way of looking at things that make him complicated. He says repeatedly that he is a “Mad man, I swear I am.” He knows there is something wrong with him, he is too depressed. The most noticeable of Holden’s “peculiarities” is how extremely judgmental he is of almost everything and everybody. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are “phony.” Holden applies the term “phony” not to people who are insincere but to those who are too conventional or too typical. And Holden hates phonies. Holden is a virgin, but he is very interested in sex, and, in fact, he spends much of the novel trying to lose his virginity. He feels strongly that sex should happen between people who care deeply about and respect one another, and he is upset by the realization that sex can be casual. Stradlater’s date with Jane doesn’t just make him jealous; it infuriates him to think of a girl he knows well having sex with a boy she doesn’t know well. He is confused and enriched by the ideas of sex. Holden’s character is one of the most complex and interesting character there is.
Mr. Antolini: Mr. Antolini is the adult who comes closest to reaching Holden. He manages to avoid alienating Holden, and being labeled a “phony,” because he doesn’t behave conventionally. He doesn’t mind Holdens quick call in the night and he also reveals on the spur of the moment that he is drinking in his messy apartment. Mr. Antolini’s advice to Holden about why he should apply himself to his studies is also unconventional. He recognizes that Holden is different from other students, and he validates Holden’s suffering and confusion by suggesting that one day they may be worth writing about. He represents education not as a path of conformity but as a means for Holden to develop his unique voice and to find the ideas that are most appropriate to him. Holden is touched on the headed, maybe patted on the head by Mr. Antolini, and Holden remarks this as sexual. However, there is little evidence to suggest that he is making a sexual overture, as Holden thinks, and much evidence that Holden misinterprets his action. Holden indicates in Chapter 19 that he is extremely nervous around possible homosexuals and that he worries about suddenly becoming one. We also know that he has been thinking about sex constantly since leaving Pencey. Finally, this is not the only scene in which Holden recoils from a physical approach. Holden does though quickly regret his hasty decision of this.
D.B. Caulfield: D.B. is Holden's older brother is a screenwriter in Hollywood. He is liked by Holden but also called a phony, because some of his works are better than others in Holden’s eyes. Holden hates the movies so he says he doesn’t love what D.B. writes. Although there are many mentions of him the most telling information we get about D.B. has to do with the war. Holden reveals in a flashback that D.B. used to be in the Army. From what the narration reveals, the experience had quite a traumatizing effect on D.B. The character of D.B. reminds us of reality and shows us the how harsh war is. Holden hates it. (674)
Themes and main ideas: “"Boy!" I said. I also say "Boy!" quite a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.” This quote sums the entire theme of growing up, up. Although Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman, his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. It shows the toughness of coming of age and how hard it is. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of phonies.
“"Well – take me (Holden) to the Edmont then," I said. “Would you (Random cab driver) care to stop on the way and join me for a cocktail? On me, I'm loaded."” Holden is lonely. Very lonely. His behavior indicates his loneliness; Holden consistently shies away from contemplation and thus doesn’t really know why he keeps behaving as he does. Because Holden depends on his isolation to preserve his detachment from the world and to maintain a level of self-protection, he often sabotages his own attempts to end his loneliness. He doesn’t like the real world or reality, it scares him. For example, his conversation with Carl Luce and his date with Sally Hayes are made unbearable by his rude behavior. His calls to Jane Gallagher are aborted for a similar reason: to protect his precious and fragile sense of individuality. (365)
The conflict: The major conflict is the phony adult world. Holden Caulfield cannot decide whether to stay with his old, nice childhood or to go to the adult world with all the “phonies.” Holden was crazy about certain things and he was emotionally and mentally compromised. Everything was viewed differently since his brother died and he started to have a mental break down. “I (Holden) was only thirteen, and they were going to have my psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.” He is always saying we don’t know Allie. Allie was something special to Holden and a symbol of the younger world; without any of the phonies. He wants to be grown up and treated like one, but yet he also wants the simplicities of a child and none of the responsibility. While I was waiting around for Phoebe in the museum, right outside the doors and all, these two little kids came up to me and asked if I knew where the mummies were. The one little kid, the one that asked me, had his pants open. I told him about it. So he buttoned them right up where he was standing talking to me – he didn't even bother to go behind a post or anything. He killed me.” This is something else that Holden prefers about children to adults: they never worry about being embarrassed. These boys are entirely unconcerned with appearances – a refreshing change from the "phonies" Holden has been surrounded by in the adult world. Holden wants that and that is the central conflict. (350)
Art form:
The Rye field in this picture you can see endless rye. Close your eyes. Imagine 20 or so kids playing in the rye just running around, but at the end of this rye field there is a cliff. A sharp steep drop that is not survivable. The kids run around and play in the rye field but they get too close to the edge; that’s why there is a man there. He saves the kids, he doesn’t let them fall, and he catches them. He is a catcher in the rye. Open your eyes. That is what Holden’s dream job is; to “catch a body coming thro the rye” (109)
New words: “The whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train.” Ostracized is to be taken out of the group or community.
“I just got very cool and nonchalant.” Nonchalant is to be cool and calm with something.
“I was pretty sadistic with him quite often.” Sadistic is the deriving of pleasure from something.
“It was very ironical. It really was. "I'm the one that's flunking out of the goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition," I said.” Ironical comes from irony and the fact that it is bizarre and strange maybe twisted.
“If you knew Stradlater, you'd have been worried, too. . . . He was unscrupulous.” Unscrupulous means to have no or very few morals of your own.
Others like this one: Other books the catcher and the rye has been related to is huckleberry fin. But in my opinion anything describing the coming of age or someone maturing in this world is directly related to this book. There have been many paintings and works of art describing a rye field and kids running and playing in that rye field and then as they approach the ledge a catcher catches them and sends them back to playing. That’s his only job, catching the kids. Such a simple idea but yet in art form it can show so much.
http://www.glogster.com/edit/g-6l2uh50hm6oudpsoeebosa0